Urban environments, when scaled to the people who live work and visit there, can be very secure and satisfying as places that offer endless opportunities for exploration and making connections. Many persons prefer to live and work in a city because of the wide range of resources that are offered. But first time visitors, commuters, and residents not familiar with a locale will miss or not appreciate much of the richness in an urban neighborhood, particularly given the bustle and hubbub of traffic and signage that is a sort of chaos or veil behind which the real city lives. Distributed access to digital information offers the opportunity to pierce that veil, and readily accessible local information that is sorted for relevance according to the needs of a guest offers a way to empower visitors, revitalize downtown economic development, foster small business, and improve the efficiency of cities in providing for people's needs.
Efforts have been made to focus on developing intelligent infrastructure. Potential applications have include parking control, dispatch of emergency services, detection of the sound of gunshots, and so forth. However substantial improvements are needed to avoid the expense of large scale capital investment in hardware, and the inherent capabilities already built into mobile devices have not been fully realized because pieces of a “closed loop” that would tie users into the smart grid are still missing.
For example, parking spaces are valuable resources, particularly in urban cores and in parking complexes such as airports, shopping centers, or sports arenas. Parking space use affects traffic, deliveries, pollution, gas mileage, and alternate transportation options. A parking space administrator desires to manage parking spaces for a broad constituency with multiple and sometimes conflicting needs. But currently, parking control is a very inefficient and chaotic process, as vehicles circle looking for available parking spaces and drivers negotiate a jungle of bewildering signs and regulations. FIG. 1 illustrates the disorder inherent in this process, which has developed by accretion and at times seems to lack any organizing principle whatsoever. This stressful situation certainly contributes to heart and lung diseases worldwide, and is in need of a remedy.
In its most malignant form, rows of traffic lights function asynchronously through the grid, so that when one is green, the next one is red, thereby limiting traffic movement to a slow drip of a few cars at a time. According to recent figures, the work involved in synchronizing traffic lights for a small urban core costs several hundred thousand dollars, and the synchronicity achieved decays rapidly. Efforts to coordinate the actions of individuals engaged in parking could lead to improvements in overall traffic flow, but has never been attempted, and is difficult to contemplate how it might work and what the outcome would be.
While efforts have been made, these limitations are illustrated for example in US Pat. Publ. Nos. 2012/0092190 and US2012/0127308 to Xerox, of which some of the concepts for “smart cities” have been implemented in Riverside, Calif.
Better optimization can also improve parking fee collection, which is a significant source of revenue for some venues. But without employing work crews to attend to the signage and enforce the regulations, limited or no capacity exists to make changes to parking space usage or pricing, and post special or temporary restrictions. In most cities and event centers, large bureaucracies exist to manage and control parking and change occurs at the pace of annual budget cycles. At this time, no ability exists to remotely coordinate parking needs with drivers, monitor usage, and revise posted parking regulations when needed, in real time.
Thus, there is a need in the art for an apparatus and system to monitor and access urban resources that overcomes the above disadvantages and offers resources to city administrators and to guest users to minimize inefficiencies and to optimize the urban experience. An optimal solution addresses needs of both vehicles and pedestrians.